Michael Shea serves as a Regulatory Policy Analyst at Friends of Cancer Research (Friends). Friends is an advocacy organization based in Washington, DC that drives collaboration among partners from every healthcare sector to power advances in science, policy, and regulation that speed life-saving treatments to patients. During the past 20 years, Friends has been instrumental in the creation and implementation of policies ensuring patients receive the best treatments in the fastest and safest way possible.

At Friends, Mr. Shea analyzes how federal and state health care policies impact biomedical innovation and the public health. Mr. Shea oversees Friends’ research initiatives, which touch on a wide range of topics, including FDA regulatory policy, clinical drug and diagnostic development, and pharmaceutical pricing and value. His research has lent support to a number of Friends’ policy initiatives, including the organization’s advocacy of the FDA breakthrough therapy designation, standardized guidelines for the management of immunotherapy toxicity, enhanced FDA oversight of laboratory developed tests, and modernization of prescription drug labeling.

Mr. Shea’s work has been published in several journals, including Clinical Cancer Research, Nature Reviews: Drug Discovery, Science Translational Medicine, and Personalized Medicine in Oncology, and has been cited in The Washington Post and The Boston Globe’s STAT blog.

Prior to joining Friends, Mr. Shea worked in Senator Max Baucus’s Washington, DC office. He graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in Political Science and has completed immersive programs in data science and machine learning at General Assembly.